The Cure song that waited 20 years to get released
The Cure have been known never to release an album until they were completely satisfied. Even if not everyone made the mark it should have, there’s a reason why a record like Songs of a Lost World was laboured over to make sure it sounded absolutely pristine when it finally arrived. That process does mean some songs festered, though, and Robert Smith remembered sitting on this song for decades before deciding to let it go.
Then again, there’s a lot more about Smith’s recording process than strictly demoing a song and then tidying everything up. Whether that’s their post-punk period or their goth masterpieces, every one of their albums benefits from the mood that the music puts you in throughout its runtime, which sometimes takes months to fine-tune until it actually sounds like the ominous tones that people know today.
For instance, look at what they do on a piece like ‘Fascination Street’. Most people might remember Disintegration for tracks like ‘Love Song’, but the key behind this tune is to make sure that everything can spread out a bit more to set the tone, with Smith’s vocals not coming in for almost two full minutes after the rest of the band begins.
While most people would want the band to get on with it, Smith makes every minute of that build-up count, too. A track like ‘Plainsong’ is still fantastic if it’s played on an acoustic guitar, but hearing those synths wash over you as the main musical motif comes in is still one of the most emotional pieces of music in their canon.
Despite having their sound down to a science by The Head on the Door, ‘Sleep When I’m Dead’ always sat around as an afterthought. Since the band could never crack the code, they figured that they would press on before dusting it off for their album 4:13 Dream in 2008, albeit with some new lyrics added in.
Smith was clearly a different person than the kid writing ‘In Between Days’ back in the day, and he knew that this tune needed to reflect a different side of himself, saying, “I’m trying to be a bit more socially aware. I’ve always been very careful to shy away from that, but the songs are about things that bother me in a global sense.”
Even though there are no overt call-outs to 2000s fashion or anything, it’s easy to see what he’s talking about when climbing to the edge of nowhere. The world had seemed to be growing all the more darker since the Bush regime had started, and while people were starting to come out of that darkness, Smith knew that it was going to be a long road ahead before anyone saw the light again.
Then again, part of the reason why The Cure’s music works so well is because of how much light is behind their tunes. They might pile on a depressing tone fairly thickly, but even though they talk about the light growing dark, it doesn’t mean that they think that it will be lost forever, either.
